Michael Stapelberg’s Debian Blog
manpages.debian.org: what’s new since the launch? (2017-04-09)
On 2017-01-18, I announced that https://manpages.debian.org had been
modernized. Let me catch you up on a few things which happened in the meantime:
-
Debian experimental was added to manpages.debian.org. I was surprised to learn that
adding experimental only required 52MB of disk usage. Further, Debian contrib
was added after realizing
that contrib licenses are compatible with the DFSG.
-
Indentation in some code examples was fixed upstream in
mandoc.
-
Address-bar search should now also work in Firefox, which apparently requires a title
attribute on the opensearch XML file reference.
-
manpages now specify
their language in the HTML tag so that search engines can offer users the
most appropriate version of the manpage.
-
I contributed
mandocd(8)
to the mandoc project, which debiman
now uses for significantly faster manpage conversion (useful for disaster
recovery/development). An entire run previously took 2 hours on my workstation.
With this change, it takes merely 22 minutes. The effects are even more
pronounced on manziarly, the VM behind manpages.debian.org.
-
Thanks to Peter Palfrader (weasel) from the Debian System Administrators (DSA)
team, manpages.debian.org is now serving its manpages (and most of its
redirects) from Debian’s static mirroring infrastructure. That way, planned
maintenance won’t result in service downtime. I contributed README.static-mirroring.txt,
which describes the infrastructure in more detail.
The list above is not complete, but rather a selection of things I found worth
pointing out to the larger public.
There are still a few things I plan to work on soon, so stay tuned :).